Australian Racial Ideology: From Cultural Homogeneity to Multiculturalism?

Australia as a nation was founded on related colonial ideologies of white supremacy and cultural homogeneity. These ideologies both guided and supported settler Australian relations with Aboriginal peoples and shaped Australia’s migration system with the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, commonly known as the White Australia Policy, being one of the first Acts of the new Australian Parliament. In the post-World War II period, these ideologies weakened due to external pressures and due to the perceived need to ‘populate or perish’, which opened migration up to Southern Europeans, but not to other non-white groups. This ideological weakening resulted in a shift in Australia’s organising racial ideologies from white supremacy and cultural homogeneity to an ideology of multiculturalism, a shift that was formalised in the 1970s with the official dismantling of the White Australia Policy. With that shift, Australia’s migration program became organised around skills rather than race. Today, more than one quarter of Australians were born overseas, many from non-white nations. Against this historical backdrop, I explore contemporary racial ideologies in Australia. Utilising in-depth interviews and media discourse analyses, I argue that while multiculturalism remains the dominant racial ideology in Australia, discourses of cultural homogeneity that value a perceived White Australia remain as competing ideologies.